November 2005

That terrible randomness

Chaos umpire sits,
And by decision more imbroiles the fray
By which he reigns: next him high arbiter
Chance governs all.
Paradise Lost

The life of man is controlled by chance
events, something he has always had difficulty in accepting. As a toolmaker he
wanted everything to have a purpose, every effect to have a cause. So primitive
man invented gods and imagined them everywhere. Pre-scientific man became
monotheistic and ascribed the inexplicable to Acts of God. Now, in the
post-scientific age, the godless neo-primitive green religion provides the
needed explanation. It is so much easier to accept events like hurricane Katrina
if you know that they are caused by other people driving round in big cars.
There are many equally bizarre
theories on offer, but they do not have such official sanction.

Diseases strike at random, especially
the dreaded cancer. People look round for explanations and there are plenty of
charlatans around to provide them. How often do you hear “It’s so unfair; he
never smoked or drank”? Yet, however rational we might try to be, we are still
profoundly disturbed when unexpected and destructive events occur. They say that
there are no atheists in a war trench.

Thus your bending author was deeply
shocked and moved by the news that the laboratories of the department in which
he professed for two decades have been totally destroyed
by fire. The Department was independently ranked in a US survey at number
four in the world. It had produced many world changing inventions in
laboratories that had unique facilities for fabricating fibre optic and silicon
micro-electronic and micro-engineered devices. Hundreds of the brightest young
people of their generation had gone out of its doors and into the world to
spread the spirit of innovation. Now it has to pick itself up, dust itself down
and start all over again.

It’s a hard, hard, hard, hard world.

1/11/05

Footnote: Thanks
for all the messages of support. They should be directed to the Department,
which now has a temporary web
facility with information on the situation.

The grovels of academe

The BBC television programme Inside
Out is making waves again. Its producers and directors seemed to have
escaped temporarily from the self-imposed, politically-correct censorship that
is the Corporation’s norm. This
time it has exposed the tip of the iceberg that is the state of academic
standards in Britain’s new universities. The scandal has been an open secret
throughout academia, which has largely been kept from or ignored by the media.
It is not, of course, confined to the new universities, but that is where it has
reached a bizarre pitch.

The original villain of this particular
piece was Kenneth Baker, Education Minister under Margaret Thatcher's
micro-managing administration. He decreed that funding should follow students.
Previously it had been administered by the University Grants Committee, which
until then had been carefully shielded academia from the attentions of
bureaucrats and politicians. Even in some of the most highly regarded
universities this has resulted in the everybody-passes syndrome. Further
fuelled by the rapidly declining standards of preparation of school leavers,
this has led to a bonfire of academic standards that has disastrous consequences
for the economy as well as the culture. The present government’s aim to
squeeze as many young people as possible into the system is already producing
the inevitable
consequences. Young people are being doubly cheated. They are talked into
taking on huge debts before they have even started out on road of adult life, in
exchange for a guaranteed degree certificate that crumbles into dust as soon as
they get their hands on it.

The Government’s approach is to keep
telling the same lie (that standards are rising); hoping, as always, that
constant repetition will give it credence. This situation is not, of course,
unique in the Anglo-Saxon world, as commentators such as Alan
Caruba confirm. It is the outcome of one of the most hard-held slogans of
the New Left – you can’t level up, so level down.

It’s a dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb world.

Footnote: It is
sadly necessary to point out that Southampton Solent University is not the same
as The University of Southampton.

02/11/05

The skeptic resiles

Readers have drawn attention to the fact
that the author of Number Watch has
been the subject of one of those Animal
Farm type revisionist attacks. It is an honour to be in the same company as one
of the few great epidemiologists, the man who established the link between
cigarette smoking and lung cancer. It is, however, disappointing and dispiriting
that the attack occurs in the Skeptic’s
Dictionary a web site previously highly recommended in our links.

A true sceptic will look at both sides
of an argument and treat those two impostors just the same. The tobacco industry
are proven gross liars and forfeit the right to be taken seriously. The EPA and
its allies are also gross liars, but they
are better at it. A self-styled sceptical treatment that treats one side of
an argument with contempt and the other side with kid gloves is, to say the
least, of dubious value. Almost every added statement (conveniently in red) is
highly disputable.

It is, for example, quite extraordinary
to claim that the convention on what constitutes a significant relative risk is
an invention of the tobacco industry (and later even the Republican Party). It
would be hard to believe that the random selection of authorities quoted in our discussion
of this matter all share either affiliation.

It would be laborious to rehearse all
the sins of the EPA. Suffice it to say that, using the methods and standards of
the EPA, anyone can prove that anything causes anything.

Just look at the example of significance
included in this
article (RR = 1.16, with a Confidence Interval (CI) of 0.93
- 1.44, no level quoted). Kill or cure? Skeptic or satirist?

The references include a classical ad
hominem attack on The Junkman, followed by tour of some of the shoddiest
examples of statistical abuse, with the usual virtual body counts etc.

Which all leaves us with the question
“What use is a Skeptic’s Dictionary contaminated by Political
Correctness?”

06/11/05

Why RR>2.0?

This piece, included as
the result of much correspondence, is intended for eventual transfer to the FAQ
section.

The
astonishing thing about these headlines is the fact that they passed without
remark. Hormone Studies: What Went Wrong? “How
could two large high-quality studies come to diametrically different conclusions
about menopause, hormone therapy and heart disease?” lamented the New York
Times in April 2003. Earlier the same month Pain killers prevent cancer
provided the giant headlines; yet in September 1999 it had been Regular pain
killer use linked to cancer. By January 2004 it was Aspirin linked with
30% increase in cancer. Or how about Soy sauce cancer warningfrom the Food Standards Agency in June 2001
followed five months later by Another Study Showing Soy Fights Cancer from
theUniversity of Missouri?

If you trawl through the journals of
epidemiology (not recommended as an exercise in edification) you will find that
for virtually every claim there is an equal and opposite counter claim. The
exception is where politically correct pressures are exerted, so that you never
see, for example, any of the hundreds of counts against tobacco contradicted.

If just one such contradiction
occurred in a branch of real science there would be the immediate calling of an
international conference to sort it out. As with cold fusion, laboratories all
over the world would attempt to replicate the results. Yet, alone in the field
of epidemiology, such conflicts are accepted as normal. The insouciance with
which epidemiologists hand down their discrepant findings, as though they do not
really expect anyone to believe them, is truly remarkable. The media, of course,
love it. They work on the principle that no one remembers last week’s
headline, and so brandish every new scare or breakthrough as though it were
gospel.

So what are the factors behind this
copious contradiction? There are three, and they are all related to the employment
of debased standards of statistical significance:

1.The absence of randomisation

2.The one in twenty lottery

3.The acceptance of low relative risks

The father of significance testing (R A
Fisher) would have no truck at all with non-randomised trials. The example in
his own work on plant growth was the unidentified streak of fertile soil, which
would play havoc with attempts to separate the effects of different treatments,
so he divided his plots up into randomised squares. Observational studies on
human populations are prey to all sorts of unidentified correlations. Nurses,
for example, are exposed to more infections than the general populace.

By the way, it is often wrongly assumed
that randomisation eliminates confounding factors. This is not true. As an
example, patients freed of arthritic pain or menopausal symptoms will have quite
a different life style from those who remain trammelled. Those on an effective
drug will then have a different life experience from those on a placebo.

The one in
twenty lottery takes the form of the well known mantras P<0.05 and the
95% confidence limit. It was Fisher, again, who unwittingly provided the
putative provenance for this level of significance, as this was the lowest level
for which he calculated his tables. He later said that this was just a
mathematical convenience and could offer no justification for it to be a
standard. Such a crude form of statistical assessment makes insufficient
allowance for the known hazards, such as natural random variation, confounding
factors, publication and other biases etc. The one in twenty criterion is so
well established in epidemiological circles that they often do not bother even
to say it, results are just “significant”. At least none of them stoops as
low as the EPA, to one in ten, which is nothing less than an admission of
desperation. There are more than twenty claims on this basis in the average
edition of an epidemiological journal, so at least one of them is likely to be
wrong, even on its own terms. In what other sphere of endeavour would a journal
be published in the light of such knowledge? Then there is the Bayesian
argument, too complex to include here, which suggests that even if we take an
agnostic view, the 0.05 is in reality 0.22.

This all leaves us with the question of
standards of relative risk, a much more difficult one to
answer in relatively lay terms. Critics like to suggest that the call for higher
standards is a frivolous invention without basis. In the case of this web site
and the associated books, it is based on extensive reading, modelling and
correspondence with senior statisticians in national and international
organisations. It is remarkable how reluctant the latter are to air in public
their private reservations about practices in epidemiology.

First and foremost there is normal
random variation. It is notable how often the actual number of cases on which an
epidemiological claim is based boils down to a number of the order of ten.
Attempts are often made to hide this, and only the Trojan
Number is quoted, but it can often be deduced. Such studies are usually
concerned with rare events. Thus, for example, if the probability of a disease
in the given time frame is 0.01 and the Trojan Number in the study is 1,000 then
there are likely to be ten incidents. Assuming the Poisson
distribution, the
standard deviation is root ten, so a likely upper value at random of RR(two standard deviations each way) is about 1.6, which is roughly the
same as the 95% (two tail) level. Readers of Sorry!might remember The
Magnificent Seven, the number of boys in a study who were supposedly
influenced to smoke by attending motor races. That was on the face of it a
significant result, at the usual desultory confidence level, but only if you
ignore all possible confounding factors, of which some were self-evident.

The very essence of confounding factors
is, however, their vagueness. Sometimes they are obvious, such as the
association of cigarette smoking, poor diet and poverty with low educational
attainment, but it is likely that the crucial ones are those that we do not
think of. A paramount source of confounding is bias in its various forms. The
existence of publication bias has been
frequently demonstrated, but there are many other forms. Detailed accounts of
some of the biases may be found in the book What
Risk? Among them are susceptibility bias, detection bias, transfer bias,
exposure bias, diagnostic misclassification bias and recall bias.

How many authorities do you have to
quote to satisfy some people? Here are some more mentioned by Steve Milloy in
his seminal self defence book Junk
Science Judo. Sir Austin Bradford Hill, the doyen of modern scientific
epidemiology refused to add coronary thrombosis to lung cancer in the results of
his study because the relative risk was only 2. Ernst Wynder, another
distinguished figure, also specifically set the boundary at 2. When researchers
reported a relative risk of 1.3 for the association of abortion with breast
cancer, among the responses were:

The National
Cancer Institute issued a special press release about abortion and breast cancer
stating, "In epidemiologic research, relative risks of less than 2 are
considered small and usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due
to chance, statistical bias or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes
not evident."

BostonUniversity epidemiologist Lynn Rosenberg said, "There is
evidence that women grossly under-report abortion. ...An [increase in risk of 30
percent] is indistinguishable from [such bias]… We are certainly not going to
arrive at the truth by averaging all the studies."

American
Cancer Society vice president Clark Heath said, "This is a fight between
science people and pro-life people. It is a great mistake to start issuing
warnings about risks or possible risks when the evidence is so unclear."

As Milloy points out, it is interesting
to note the different approach of the establishment when offered the RR of 1.3
for politically correct abortion and 1.19 for politically incorrect passive
smoking.

The main argument, however, must always
be The proof of the pudding is in the
eating. The inevitable contradictions we started with exist only because of
the debased standards of statistical significance that have come to infest the
field of epidemiology. They have turned the subject into a zero sum game –
each claim is cancelled out by another. The net contribution of modern
epidemiology to human knowledge and wellbeing is zilch.

The startling result on cigarette
smoking and lung cancer triggered a gold rush. Hordes of new epidemiologists
arrived in the foothills with their brand new tools, ready to stake their claim.
Unfortunately, there ain’t no gold in
them thar hills.The whole
caboodle was only kept going by trading in the fool’s gold (iron pyrites)
represented by junk statistics. If reasonable levels of significance were
observed (RR>2, P<0.01) there would be virtually none of the
contradictions. There would also be no journals, or even departments, of
epidemiology, no great scares and breakthroughs that sell so many newspapers and
TV ads and no sticks with which authoritarian politicians and bureaucrats can
beat the populace into submission; so, it is not going to be allowed to happen.

Finally, it is not relative risk that
matters to people, but absolute risk. Double a risk of one in a million and it
is still not worth losing any sleep over. Double a risk of one in two and you
are dead.

10/11/05

Footnote: Unwittingly, there is no review
of the important book What Risk? on this site. This serious
omission will be rectified shortly.

Drawing the line

Some readers appear disappointed by the
failure of the above piece to provide a mathematical justification of a
particular choice of RR. They misunderstand the nature of mathematics. It can
marshal the facts for you, but it cannot make a judgement.

Take the case of abortion. Your bending
author had nightmares after reading the account by a nurse of a fully-formed,
legally aborted, foetus gasping for its first and last breath on a hospital
draining board. This is murder: officially sanctioned, supported by a powerful
lobby, but murder just the same, and a desecration of the Hippocratic Oath to
boot.

On the other hand, it would be difficult
to condemn, without appealing to religious arguments, the scraping of a few
undifferentiated cells from the wall of a uterus.

In between these two extremes there is
reasonable boundary, but where is it?

So it is with Relative Risk. Clearly
values of less than, say, 1.3 give rise to absurdity, while values over 3 are,
more or less, indisputable.

In both cases the boundary is determined
by personal convictions about morality and politics. At this time in the western
world we have an Establishment that is authoritarian in nature. The
Establishment is not, of course, the same as the Government, particularly in the
USA. In Britain they are more closely aligned, but wrath falls upon the
Government when it deviates from Establishment norms, as in the case of the
invasion of Iraq.

By its very nature, the Establishment is
populated by people who get their kicks out of pushing other people around. It
controls funding and most of the media. It is not so omnipotent that it can
proceed without evidence, so it buys the evidence it needs. It does not
commission research, it commissions results. So, for example, if the existence
of the Little Ice Age and the Mediaeval Warm Period are inconvenient, in true
Orwellian fashion it pays someone to “prove” that they never happened,
despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary from art, history and science.

It is thus very convenient for the
Establishment to have available a “science” that can produce required
results on demand: hence modern epidemiology wedded to low relative risks. The
great figures who laid the basis for a rigorous form of epidemiology (Snow,
Fisher, Hill, Feinstein etc.) are simply written out of history. When the
Establishment takes against something, especially its iconic hate object of
tobacco, copious funding is available for manufacturing the right results, and
it is withdrawn if researchers stray from the true path. Many of the techniques
it sponsors are biologically totally implausible (such as linear no-threshold
extrapolation), but debased standards of statistical significance remain the key
weapon.

The dilemma for sceptics and lovers of
science and its methods is that there is no mathematically provable threshold of
significance. Some argue, with considerable cogency, that the whole business of
significance testing is overdone and should be abandoned. The idea is certainly
rife in scientific publications that P<0.05 is the end rather than the means.

The small army of pensioned-off
professors and other unfunded opponents of the despoliation of science face a
daunting task, but remember Agincourt and keep the small flame burning.

12/11/05

Art and craft

Here is an interesting chart:

What? You don't find it interesting? Can't you recognise a
boom when you see one?

Let's see whether the Sunday Times Art Department
(November 20th) can help with a bit of chartmanship:

20/11/05

Just in case you have not yet got the message, and trusting
that you are not too fazed by discrepancies in data, here is a chart from The
Times of the next
day.

21/11/05

Personal note: Apologies to
correspondents who have not yet received replies to e-mails. For a variety of
reasons a backlog has built up.

The British pensions fiasco

Most adverse political decisions can be
described as stupid, but for a select few only the word wicked will suffice. Such was Gordon Brown’s decision to raid
private pension funds to the tune of £5 billion per year. It broke the
tradition of precluding double taxation (you either tax when the money is put in
or when it is taken out, but not both). It came at a time when private industry
was already shackled by red tape and imposts, so that the share income of
pension funds was in serious decline. More rigorous accounting standards
required deficits in private pension funds (but not public ones) to be declared
and rectified. Perhaps worst of all, it gave the signal that the Government did
not care about private sector pensions, so once generous schemes began
disappearing in great numbers.

In pre-Blair times Britain had the
soundest pension system in Europe. It now has the weakest. The declared New
Labour slogan was Education, education,
education, (of which more later) but the covert one was Procrastination,
procrastination, procrastination. The Great Leader’s answer to any
difficult decision is to commission a policy review. You might think that, after
eight years in power, he would be aware of the self parody in still calling for
more policy reviews (as, for example, with the energy crisis). The outcome is
usually the issue of a long report after an extended period of gestation, most
of which is immediately kicked into the long grass. Thus vital decisions
affecting the well-being of the nation are left unmade and the politicians can
get on with the things they really enjoy, like banning things of which they
disapprove.

Amid all the political verbiage, the
situation at present seems to be that employees in the wealth-generating private
sector will be required to work until they are 68 for a dubious pension
entitlement, while those in the wealth-dissipating public sector will retire at
60 with a generous inflation-proofed pension subsidised from the taxation of the
first group. Members of Parliament, of course, now do even better.

In the great tradition of Labour
governments, this one will leave behind a legacy of debt that future chancellors
will have to grapple with for at least a generation. Those who are now
pensioners spent their whole working lives paying back the debt of the post-war
Labour government. The next generation will have to find, out of their taxes,
funds to maintain Gordon’s bureaucratic army with generous inflation-proofed
early retirement. Without being consulted, they have been nominated to be
guarantors of an enormous, oppressive liability, while future chancellors will
have to bear the opprobrium of the consequent economic harm.

Anyway, this has all come to a head with
the issue on this day of the Turner
Report, which was the Government’s excuse for an extra three years of
prevarication, on top of the previous five years of inaction. Just as with the
potential disaster of joining the Euro, theGovernment’s reaction is to apply five
tests, which as they have shown in the case of the Euro can be made to last
indefinitely.

Turner has proposed that the age of
retirement eventually be raised to 68. The justification for this is that people
are living longer. This is a typical modern blinkered approach that ignores the
realities. The age of retirement was not chosen on the basis of how long people
live, but rather on the age at which health problems (both physical and mental)
begin to increase sharply. In fact, most people who lose their jobs in their
fifties never get another one. It is a matter of common observation that the
threshold for such problems is about 65. Sometimes they occur much earlier. A
case that eventually turned out to be early onset Alzheimer’s once caused, to
say the least, great embarrassment to your bending author. Imagine the
consequences of this happening on a large scale. It is enough to bring a glow to
the eyes of predatory lawyers. Of course, there are also many people who can,
and do, carry on working into their eighties, but they will not be the problem
cases.

Which all brings us to:

Number of the month – 3
million

The headline on the front page of the
last Times of the month was Saver
tax on firms to salvage pensions, but the headline on
page 2 provided an interesting contrast – Brown’s
pension to be worth £3 million if he becomes prime minister.

You might feel pleased that a man from
modest origins has achieved such success in life. On the other hand, you might
think it is the most outrageous example of PUTLIAR and
DAISNAID you have come across, which is quite an achievement among the most
grasping and venal generation of politicians in modern times.